Research Question
How does the the proficiency level in Reading and Language skill vary across state for High School Students? How does it differ by students characteristics such as English Learner status, Student with Disability, Low Income students?
Data Source: State Assessments in Reading/Language Arts and Mathematics- School Year 2018-19 EDFacts Data Documentation, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC: EDFacts. Retrieved February 2, 2022 from http://www.ed.gov/edfacts
I decided to use map graph to visualize the achievement gap of students with disability, EL students, and Low-income students compared to their peers. This way, audience can compare each state math achievement across all categories as well as able to perceive the intensity of gap with heatmap color for easier interpretation.
The goal of these bar plots is to show achievement gap of students with disability, EL students, and Low-income students compared to their peers. In the previos set of plots, the bar was presented on its own. I decided to add the all students average in grey as the background for easier comparison. However, I want people to be able to compare the difference all at once in one frame.
Research Question
How does the the proficiency level in math vary across state for High School Students? Also, how does it vary across the US regions (i.e Midwest, Northeast, South, and West)?
Data Source: State Assessments in Reading/Language Arts and Mathematics- School Year 2018-19 EDFacts Data Documentation, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC: EDFacts. Retrieved February 2, 2022 from http://www.ed.gov/edfacts
The south region has relatively high percentage of students at and above Math proficiency, in contrast, the West region has relatively low percentage of students at and above Math proficiency. There is no clear pattern for Midwest and Northeast regions as there is large variation of Math profiency within these regions.
Another way to display the variation of Math proficiency skill across states is by showing how far the state mean diverge above and below the national mean. I like the simplicity of this map instead of the previous one and chose red color to represent below the average and green color to represent above the average. I think this map is easier to understand for general audience.
This is the initial diverging plot that includes anotated state mean difference relative to national average. However, the number is too small and the information has already displayed through the geom_segment() line. I decided to use the other diverging bar plot.
Research Question
How does the the proficiency level in Reading and Language skill vary across state for High School Students? How does it differ by students characteristics such as English Learner status, Student with Disability, Low Income students?
Data Source: Distric Fiscal documentation 2018 School year 2019 Retrieved February 2, 2022.
On Average, Indiana spent the most on textbook per student at $107, while Hawaii spent the least on textbook per student at $14.
The average spending per students in district level is aggregated at the state level. Since we will calculate the textbook spending and student achievement only in state level, I decided to have to state-level map as the final version.
Initially, we wanted to present overall district spending per student in one large US map. However, we had two problems with the plan. 1. The amount of time to render the plot is too long and 2. Too many information in one map and it might distract our audience from our main goal. We decided to have each state district spending and play around with ggplotly function where audience can zoom in and out easily.
Color-blind OR Plot
Research Question
What is the relationship between District Textbook Funding per Student and Students’ Math and RLA achievements?
Data Source: State Assessments in Reading/Language Arts and Mathematics- School Year 2018-19 EDFacts Data Documentation, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC: EDFacts. Retrieved February 2, 2022 from http://www.ed.gov/edfacts
States with relatively low spending on textbook have lower percentage students at and above Math proficiency level.
This is my final plot where I added a linear line and annotated the correlation between Textbook spending and Math achievement. I highlighted the 3 top and bottom states based on their Math achievement and colored the rest of the states with gray and a degree of transparency. This plot is simple and highlighted the most important information.
Borrowing the existing template from another github, I tried to visualize the relationship between textbook spending and RLA achievement. I added the size function on geom_point to display amount of textbook spending. Eventhough the plot is pretty, the size of the point is a hard to discriminate.
This is the initial plot when I tried to visualize the relationship between achievemen and textbook spending. Although all information is there, this map is too crowded with information of state name.
I like the simplicity of this plot and the national average dashed line, however, the geom_point size displaying textbook spending per student is hard to differenciate and overlapped with each other.
This plot is clean and interesting to see because I could highlight selected state based on upper and lower criteria I specified in my code. However, I only want to use two different colors to distinguish the 3 top and lower states. A variety of color on the circle and state names are a little bit too distracting.
Variables:
LEAID - ID number for each school district
total - Total number of students in a school district
textbk_exp_per_student - Textbook Expenditure per Student
percentM - Percent of student population in a school district identifying as minorities
percentW - Percent of student population in a school district identifying as white
Data Source: https://usafacts.org/
| Total Number of Students per District | Textbook Expenditure per Student | Percent of Student Population Identifying as Minority | Percent of Student Population Identifying as White | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| total | ||||
| textbk_exp_per_student | 0.00 | |||
| percentM | 0.21*** | 0.05*** | ||
| percentW | -0.21*** | -0.05*** | -1.00*** |
The ovals display the type of correlation direction, but there are no significance asterisks included for the correlations.
This initial version seems to busy with the large vs. small font sizes and red lines.
This correlation matrix is missing the lines from the scatterplots, but it is cleaner visually with some overlap in x-axis labels.
The color is more easily changed via the pairs.panels function.